Michelle Obama urges voters to "step up" for Tom Wolf

Noel McLaren reports on First Lady Michelle Obama's visit to Philadelphia on Wednesday.

Noel McLaren reports on First Lady Michelle Obama's visit to Philadelphia on Wednesday.

Thomas FitzgeraldThe Philadelphia Inquirer

First Lady urges Pa. voters to “step up” for Tom Wolf

First lady Michelle Obama on Wednesday urged a partisan crowd in Northwest Philadelphia to "step up" and work to elect Democrat Tom Wolf governor.

Her visit was aimed at fighting off a worry of party strategists - that Wolf's solid and long-standing lead in the polls, coupled with the typical midterm falloff in turnout among core Democratic voters, could be disastrous Nov. 4.

"If we want change here in Pennsylvania, then we need to take responsibility," Obama told several hundred cheering people at a morning rally at Dorothy Emanuel Recreation Center in East Mount Airy.

President Obama, too, will come to Pennsylvania for Wolf in the last week of the campaign as part of a seven-state swing, the White House said Wednesday.

Campaign workers with clipboards moved through the rec center's gym, signing up people to take shifts making phone calls or knocking on doors, and Michelle Obama twice recited the Wolf campaign's web address.

She said that Wolf, a York businessman who turned around the family kitchen cabinet company with worker-friendly policies such as profit-sharing, would not accept "crumbling classrooms" and teacher shortages. It was a reference to cuts in state education funding early in Gov. Corbett's term that still are being felt in many school districts.

In addition, Obama said, Wolf will fight for an increase in the minimum wage, work for pay equity for women, and safeguard the right of women to make family-planning decisions for themselves.

Wolf has led Corbett by an average of 15 percentage points in public polls, though some Republicans say their private polls have the race tightening to a single-digit deficit.

A strong showing in Philadelphia, where 80 percent of more than one million voters are registered Democrats, could be crucial to Wolf's chances. Four years ago, only 40 percent of city voters cast ballots in the governor's race, compared with a 48 percent turnout rate in the rest of the state.

That was the year Corbett won his first term - by 9 percentage points over former Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato, who was not well-known in Philadelphia.

The Democrat lost by 179,000 votes, which Obama told her audience amounted to just 20 voters per precinct statewide.

Ken Smukler, a veteran Democratic strategist from Philadelphia, said he expected a low turnout in the city.

"When the polls show one candidate way ahead, and they don't change, I think that's a disincentive to turn out," Smukler said. In addition, there are no hard-fought races for the legislature or Congress to "get anybody's juices up," Smukler said.

Wolf's campaign is largely relying on organized labor to provide ground troops in the city, Democrats say. On a recent Saturday, for instance, several hundred members of the Service Employees International Union and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers hit 7,000 doors in North Philadelphia.

"You knock on doors, and some folks don't even know there's an election coming up," said Karl Johnson, an SEIU member and maintenance employee at Philadelphia's School of the Future, who has been knocking on doors most Saturdays since the summer.

"First, we have to educate," Johnson said. When people are reminded of the election, he said, Wolf is an easy sell because Corbett is deeply unpopular in the city.

On Wednesday, Wolf introduced Obama - "one of the most amazing people in the world" - and basked in the glow. After the rally, the two shook hands with people along the stage.

"Don't believe any of the polls," Wolf said, "until the one that ends the evening of Nov. 4, when they call the election."

Obama said that too many of the voters who elected her husband in 2008 "tuned out" in the midterm elections in 2010, when the GOP took control of the House amid the rise of the tea party movement.

"And that's what folks on the other side are counting on right now," she said. "Because when we stay home, they win."

Laura Moten, 71, needed no convincing. Moments earlier, as she waited for Obama to appear, Moten said she was certain to vote and convinced of the importance of doing so without the first lady's prompting. She likes Wolf's story of turning around a family business, and she had no use for Corbett. "He's a tea party man," Moten said, "a union buster."

The crowd roared with Obama's exhortations and laughed at her mimicking of excuses people have for not voting. (She suggested that each listener smack that young nephew who was ho-hum about getting to the polls.)

They also loved a riff in which she defended her husband's administration as having pulled the nation back from the economic brink.

Republicans are "hoping and praying that we're not organized and energized," she said. "Only we can prove them wrong."